[GRLUG] A Moment of Silence

[Philip J. Robar]

On Sep 7, 2011, at 3:10 PM, Ben Rousch wrote:

> I would like to ask for a moment of silence. I just decommissioned my
> company's main Samba virtual machine which had been running Ubuntu
> 6.06 LTS since 2006.

At Sun we regularly heard about machines that had been running for years. Solaris is so reliable that smaller customers have forgotten where their servers are. One story, perhaps apocryphal, told of a small server that got walled up when a room was rearanged and had to be found by breaking through the wall board. A field support person once found a machine in a closet that was so clogged with dust that the fans were no longer spinning, but it still running happily. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if AIX or HP/UX were similarly as reliable, but I’m pretty sure that SGI’s IRIX couldn’t make similar claims:

A friend of mine (also an ex-Sun person) early on in his new job as VP of Eng. at an Internet Bubble Startup* asked the founder, “I’ve noticed that the SGI servers panic rather regularly. Has anyone looked into this or called SGI?”

Founder, “No need to worry, they just do that. And they were free."

My friend’s head then exploded.


Phil

*Bigfoot for those of you with long memories.


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